It was the subtitle of this book (From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris) that reeled me in, combined with my inability to resist reading the thoughts of Conway Morris on what that subtitle advertises: "Six Myths of Evolution." I'm about halfway through the book, and through three of the six myths. It was my intention to start writing about the book when I'd finished it, but now I think it will be more fun to write about it chapter by chapter. Each chapter can stand mostly alone, which helps. But the main reason to do it stepwise is this: although the book is aiming at some larger goal, the fact that this goal is unrelated (so far) to anything resembling a myth means that it will be interesting and/or instructive to see how it plays out.
The first place one might look for the author's intention in discussing "myths" would be the Introduction. Hahaha nope. It's three pages of a bizarre conversation with someone named Mortimer*, in Venice. Mortimer does most of the talking, as one might expect from a sock puppet. Three pages of indulgence about "going off the rails" (but you see, that's good), a fond reference to Teilhard ("a much neglected figure"), a classless swipe at "our materialist chums" (they "never wanted to know what the universe was really like"), and the expected wink at the divine: "...to fool ourselves that the mental world of a chimpanzee is just a dilute version of our minds, or rather a Mind."
Yeah yeah yeah but what are these myths? Mortimer comes close to defining what he means by a myth: "...not fairy tales but areas of received wisdom that are long overdue for careful reexamination."
And that's our first clue — blink and you miss it — that this is not a book about myths of evolution.
It's not even a book about controversies in evolution, if the first chapter — the first myth — is a portent. That first chapter, the subject of my next post, is a good old-fashioned strawman.The book is already a big disappointment, then, and I admit I'm sorry I paid money for it. But there's no going back now (it's like Dollo's Law!) so here are two themes I will apply as I go through the six myths.
1. I'm a rebel and I will always support my comrades in resistance. Conway Morris — speaking through the tedious Mortimer — claims to want to "stir those slumbering giants of received wisdom" and to otherwise cause trouble. Well hey, sacred cows make great fajitas, and apostasy is one of my areas of expertise! We'll look in each chapter for evidence of resistance to orthodoxy, which means first we'll look for...orthodoxy.
2. At least some of the chapters — the myths — are awkward thrashings of strawpeople or are otherwise DOA as arguments for (or against) anything interesting. But all of them are packed with priceless nuggets of fact and theory about the natural world. Even while flailing about on an apparent garden path, Conway Morris is encyclopedic in his knowledge and utterly brilliant in finding explanatory connections among hundreds of cited works. (The book is about 400 pages long, and 170 of those pages are notes.) We'll look in each chapter for great stories of biology.
Next up is the first chapter: "The Myth of No Limits." It's as ridiculous as it sounds.
*Professor Mortimer is a fictional character, more accurately a sock puppet, who appears several times in Conway Morris' previous book, The Runes of Evolution, which I haven't read. He was previously mentioned years before that.
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